'A lot of women are rising up': Harris hopes hinge on female vote

In battleground states like Arizona and Michigan, young women are lining up to vote early. Kamala Harris is hoping they are the tide that turns the election for her.

On an abnormally warm fall morning on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, dozens of students stood in line to vote at the university’s early voting centre.

Among them was Keely Ganong, a third-year student who was excited to vote for Harris.

“She’s just a leader that I would to look up to to represent my country,” she said.

“Gender equality is on the forefront of the issues,” said her friend Lola Nordlinger, referencing abortion rights. “A woman’s choice is something that’s so personal to her, and it really should be no one else’s decision.”

Ms Ganong said everyone on campus is talking about voting with less than a week before election day.

“Student voices are definitely going to make a difference” in the election, the 20-year-old said.

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Adrianna Pete, a 24-year-old who was on campus volunteering to teach students about the democratic process, agrees:

“I feel like a lot of women are rising up,” she said.

These young women are, in many ways, typical Harris voters. According to a recent poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics, Harris leads amongst women 18-29 by a whopping 30 points. Amongst college students specifically, of either gender, she leads by 38 points, a recent survey from Inside Higher Ed/Generation Lab survey found.

With polls neck-and-neck both nationally and in battleground states like Michigan, Harris will be counting on these young women to show up, in big numbers, to win the election.

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It’s a point not lost on Hannah Brocks, 20, who waited in a long line last week to attend a packed Harris and Walz rally in Ann Arbor in a local park. She’s been involved in the school’s young Democrats club, knocking on doors, sending flyers and making phone calls to try to convince people to vote for Harris.

“I just like the way she talks about people in general,” Ms Brocks said. “It’s just so much love and empathy in the way she talks about other people.”

That edge amongst young women could be amplified even more if voter turnout this election follows the same patterns as it did in 2020, when about 10 million more women voted than men, according to the Center for American Women in Politics.

Early voting exit polls show a similar breakdown this time around, with about 55% women, 45% men, according to a Politico analysis, though analysts caution we have no idea who these women have voted for.

But while much has been made of how this election is shaping up to be boys versus girls, the reality is much more complex. In that same Harvard poll, Harris’s lead amongst white women under 30 was 13 points ahead of Trump, compared to a 55-point advantage amongst non-white women under 30.

When white women of all ages are surveyed, Harris’s lead all but vanishes. It’s a history that could be repeating – in 2016, more white women backed Trump than Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump’s lead with white women widened.

Democrats in general have had an especially tough time with white, non-college educated voters, male and female. If Harris wants to win, she’ll have to not only have to get high turnout among the young women who support her, she’ll have to convince some women who might not fit the mould too.

“The best avatar for a voter writ large is a woman in a swing state who didn’t go to college,” says pollster Evan Roth Smith, from Blueprint, a Democratic public opinion research company.

While these women seem to trust the Republican Party more on issues like immigration and the economy, Mr Smith says abortion could be the issue that turns them towards Harris.

The vice-president has promised to restore abortion rights, while Trump has taken credit for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which used to guarantee women a right to abortion nationally.

Women at a Harris rally in the battleground state of Arizona told the BBC that the stakes this year feel especially high. The state has a question on the ballot that would allow voters to decide whether the right to abortion should be enshrined in the state’s constitution. Abortion is currently illegal after 15 weeks, with few exceptions.

Mary Jelkovsky is hopeful abortion being on the ballot here in Arizona could help bring a blue tide.

Wearing a bright blue sweatshirt reading “vote with your vag,” the 26-year-old told the BBC she and her husband have started trying to get pregnant.

She says the idea that this could be forced on someone now with Roe v Wade being overturned was hard to wrap her brain around.

Ms Jelkovsky says the Supreme Court decision opened up important conversations with her friends and family. She says she learned multiple loved ones had had bortions, including once for a life-saving measure.

“It’s personal but it’s so important to have these conversations,” she says. “For us [women], this election couldn’t be more important.”

The Harris campaign is hoping the abortion issue will not just inspire Democrats to turn up at the polls, but convince Republican women to flip sides. These “silent” Harris voters, as political analysts like to call them, could help boost her numbers in especially tight races.

Arizonian Rebecca Gau, 53, was a lifelong Republican until Trump ran for president. When she cast her vote for Joe Biden in 2020, she said it was a protest vote. But this time around, she says she feels excited to vote for Harris.

“I felt like she could represent me as a practical American woman,” she told the BBC earlier in October.

She said she’s tired of “toxic masculinity”, and she thinks other Republican women, like her, feel the same way.

“I don’t care what the political persuasion is - women are fed up,” she said.

But not all Republican women are convinced. Tracey Sorrel, a Texan who is part of the BBC's Voter Panel, said she thinks Harris would take abortion rights too far. Ultimately, even though she doesn't like some of what he says, Ms Sorrel said she will vote for Trump.

"I'm not voting personality. I'm voting policy. I don't have to marry the man," she said.

With additional reporting from Robin Levinson King and Rachel Looker